146 RoboCup-99 Team Descriptions Middle Robots League, Team ISI-DreamTeam99, pages 146–149 http://www.ep.liu.se/ea/cis/1999/006/23/ DREAMTEAM 99: Team Description Paper ISI-DreamTeam99 Wei-Min Shen, Behnam Salemi, Jay Modi, Rogelio Adobbati WS, BS, JM, RA: Information Sciences Institute/University of Southern California 1 Philosophy and Goals Our primary goal in the Robocup project is to build autonomous physical robots that can function robustly in a challenging environment. Obviously, this implies two things about our robots: Requirement 1: They must be autonomous. Requirement 2: They must be robust. These requirements have significant implications on the methodology we use to build and program our robots. In particular, Requirement 1 implies that processing must be distributed and on-board. No remote computing or centralized control is allowed. Requirement 2 implies that algorithms and hardware must be simple enough to guarantee reliability. Indeed, a guiding philosophy in building these robots is to favor robustness over sophistication. Adhering to the requirements outlined above, our efforts can be decomposed into three specific specialties; hardware, vision and learning. Section 2 below describes the hardware of our physical robots, section 3 describes our vision system and section 4 describes learning. Section 5 has a brief description of our soccer playing algorithm. 2 Hardware Our robots are constructed from scratch and by our team. The flexibility to modify our custom-built robots gives us an added dimension for exper- imentation. As we learn more about what capabilities are needed by an autonomous physical agent interacting with its environment, we are able to easily adapt and extend our custom-built robots. For example, in the past two years, we have been able to add dual cameras, replace motors, and redesign the base. The next section describes the hardware of our robots in detail. The base of each robot is a modified 4-wheel, 2x4 drive DC model car. Specifically, we have lowered and widened the base for added stability. The wheels are independently controlled, allowing in-place turning and easy